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A week or two ago I had a heated argument on Twitter with someone who was adamant that Amazon
would remain an infrastructure player and avoid the temptation to move
up the stack. Even after the release of DynamoDB, we weren’t entirely
sure as to their intentions. That kind of changed today with the release
of Amazon Simple Workflow Service (SWF).

Today AWS launched an exciting new service for
developers: the Amazon Simple Workflow Service. Amazon SWF is an
orchestration service for building scalable distributed applications.
Often an application consists of several different tasks to be performed
in particular sequence driven by a set of dynamic conditions. Amazon
SWF makes it very easy for developers to architect and implement these
tasks, run them in the cloud or on premise and coordinate their flow.
Amazon SWF manages the execution flow such that the tasks are load
balanced across the registered workers, that inter-task dependencies are
respected, that concurrency is handled appropriately and that child
workflows are executed.

Have no doubt – this is PaaS in all but name. Which leaves a big
question as to how AWS will message this move to it’s large number of
customers who are PaaS providers – Both Heroku and EngineYard are large consumers of Amazon IaaS.

It’s now almost impossible for Vogels to credibly claim they’re not
focusing on moving up the stack as fast as possible, which leaves some
of the other services with some choices to make.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there aren’t late night meetings going on
in the board rooms of a number of PaaS providers – determining the best
way to differentiate themselves whilst still on AWS infrastructure, or
alternative arrangements if Amazon really goes nuclear on PaaS.

One of those conversations is no doubt occurring in Heroku’s offices and they have the benefit of being owned by Salesforce.
Even before this announcement I would have predicted Heroku being
available on multiple infrastructure layers in the near future. Now I’d
not be surprised to see Heroku rolled into Salesforce’s own data centers
to leverage the independence of Salesforce infra along with the obvious
connections between Heroku and Force.

Netflix too is in an interesting situation. One of AWSs largest
customers, and the creator of a number of platform components many of
which have been open sourced to the community. It’ll be interesting to
see their response to this as well. CloudFoundry? There’s another
interesting story… Oh to be a fly on the wall….